The Greater Pigford Problem

Big Whoopee.  The New York Times has finally done a bit of investigating into the Pigford scandal, and found it a cesspit of corruption.

The original scandal was the the US Department of Agriculture had discriminated against some black farmers in the awarding of crop loans.  In 1999 the Clinton Administration agreed to pay $50,000 to each farmer that had been discriminated against in the period 1981 to 1996.  But it turned out that the cure was worse than the disease as tens of thousands of blacks signed up for free money.

Even Barack Obama got into the act, in 2007.

In 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama pushed for allowing late claims to be processed and setting up another billion-dollar payoff fund, in what became known as Pigford II, setting off a free-for-all. As of February 2006, “over 97,000 people had filed claims under the consent decree or requests to file late claims.”

How many black farmers had been discriminated against?  One USDA administrator reckoned, in testimony to Congress: "about fifty."

The problem here is not merely corruption, or the use of race to beat up on people making accusations about corruption.  It is the bigger problem of retributive politics.  Let alone redistributive politics.

What good does it do to hand around free money to any politically favored group when the group as a whole is cratering in the larger economy?

Here we have President Obama, the First Black President.  You'd think he'd really concentrate on formulating policy and executing on it so that the lives of black people would really improve.

You'd think.

But the results are now coming in.  Blacks are doing worse than the average American in the Obama economy.  Much worse.  In January 2009 the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent.  In March 2013 it was 7.6 percent.

For whites the unemployment rate in January 2009 was 7.1 percent.  Now it is 6.7 percent.


For blacks the unemployment rate in January 2009 was 12.7 percent.  Now it is 13.3 percent.

For black youth the unemployment rate in January 2009 was 34.8 percent.  Now it is 33.8 percent.

What we are seeing is same old same old.  From a president that promised to transform America.

You can check the numbers here.

So, what's the point of a First Black President if he can't do anything at the macroeconomic level for blacks?

Let's assume that the president really wants to help people of color.  Let's assume that he really wants to improve the lives, and especially the economic lives, of black people.

Given such a record of failure, you would have to assume that the president has pursued exactly the wrong policy to make life better for blacks.  Assuming that he honestly wants to do the right thing, you would have to assume that he doesn't have a clue what the right thing is.  Or worse, that the policy he thinks is the right thing is in fact tragically mistaken, and doesn't help blacks in the least.

In fact we had a curious confirmation of that last week when it turned out the sector that did best economically in the first two years of the Obama administration was the top 7 percent.

Why was that?  Well, the rich did well because their stocks rebounded from the 2008 crash while the home prices for the 93 percent didn't rebound.

Gee now, I wonder why?  Could it be that the average person was encouraged by the government to get way overleveraged by government programs that subsidized home mortgages?  And that the government subsidies led to a bubble in home prices?  And that the government in particular encouraged loans to sub-prime borrowers, particularly minorities?  And that minorities were hardest hit by the subsequent crash in home prices, because they had the least equity in their homes?

Do you think that maybe, after President Obama is gone and that racial minorities no longer have their racial pride to look after, that minority voters will respond to a political meme that declares the Democrats just don't have a clue what they are doing?

Because, really, the economic policy of the Democratic Party is really Pigford writ large.  Democrats believe that the way to help minorities is to find a racial scab and scratch it.  Find a racial wrong and pay reparations to the victims.

But the problem is that after the wrong has been righted and the reparations paid and the free stuff handed out to the Democratic Party supporters, the problem is still there.  

The victims have to get out and get a job.  How would they do that when the Democrats have been training them fo decades to believe in winning the political lottery as the meaning of life?

What End of Entitlement?

Now he tells us.  The age of entitlement is over; the promises are worthless.  That's the word from the Washington Post's sensible Robert Samuelson.

We had a grand vision. We didn't merely expect things to get better. We expected all social problems to be solved. We expected business cycles, economic insecurity, poverty, and racism to end. We expected almost limitless personal freedom and self-fulfillment. For those who couldn't live life to its fullest (as a result of old age, disability, or bad luck), we expected a generous social safety net to guarantee decent lives. We blurred the distinction between progress and perfection.

There were four big assumptions at the heart of this, according to Samuelson: first, that we could control the business cycle; second, that we could enjoy lifetime jobs at big corporations; third, that improving productivity could pay for bigger government; and fourth, that lifestyle choices came free.

All wrong.  So now what do we do?

No answer, of course.

Let's put it this way.  There is no way we can avoid a crack-up, because people have been told, and believe, that all you need to do, as Samuelson quotes Bill Clinton, is "work hard and play by the rules, [and] you’ll have the freedom and opportunity to pursue your own dreams."

People interpret that to mean that all they have to do is sit on their butts, doing whatever they are doing, and they deserve to get supported by government.  The system will take care of them.

But life's not like that; it never has been.  The idea that hard work and following the rules is necessary and sufficient for the good life is a political chimera.  Yeah!  I put in my time.  I got my benefits coming.  I earned them.

It is not true that all we have to do is design and build a system, whether a corporate system at General Motors or a government system for Social Security and Medicare.  That's not how the world works.  And the neo-Marxists at the Frankfurt School understood that when they said that reason was domination.  Reason is always trying to impose a system on the world, whether it is a system to understand the world, a system to dominate the world, or a system to make the world go away.

You can't reduce the world to a system.  The world changes and adapts and surprises every moment.  To live in the world you have to be willing to change, adapt, and get surprised every moment.  If you don't submit to that then you are setting yourself up to be slapped upside the head.

Like right now.

So now we must start again.  We must wipe away the tears of disappointment, and cool the rage of ill-usage.  We must clear our minds and start to deal with the world as it is, not as we were taught.  Almost all religions call on their adherents to surrender to the world.  You can see why.  You can hope for salvation and for enlightenment, but first you have to live in the world as it is.

Now, of course, we already have remarkable adaptations that humans have developed to cope with the world as it is.  One of them is the family.  Another is the division of labor.  Another is the price system. Another is the credit system.  There is the tapestry of voluntary associations and civil society.  All of these are human social constructs that fall short of rigid system, but wonderfully facilitate human cooperation and sociability.

Think of it.  People care most for those nearest and dearest by blood.  So all societies down the ages have encouraged healthy families.  All except our modern progressives.  People prefer to become master of one rather than a jack of all trades.  But Marx said that the division of labor caused alienation of the worker from his species-essence.  The price system and the credit system are wonderful devices for channeling human labor into the ways that get people what they want and need.  So liberals do everything they can to attack the price system and subvert the credit system.  And civil society is much kinder and more compassionate to human needs and suffering than the force matrix of government.  So liberals destroyed the safety net of fraternal associations that grew up in the 19th century.

Why don't we go there and embrace the social adaptations from family to civil society?  Because the serpent tempted me, and I did eat.  Everyone is a sucker for a shortcut; everyone is convinced of his own virtue and his own right to the good things of life.  Everyone likes a birthday gift, a cadeau, a regalo: free stuff.  Hey, we're owed, we're entitled.

Well, now the god of system has failed.  Now we have to pick up the pieces and start again.

The only question is whether we will suck it in or continue to squabble over the fast disappearing spoils of the administrative welfare state up to the very day that the last goodie, the last benefit, the last chunk of free stuff is gone.  Cue the Fram oil filter guy.

Nobody knows how it will all turn out.  But we can work, and we can hope.

Bush's Legacy

As the good and the great attend the opening of President Bush's presidential library people are suddenly discovering that Bush wasn't so bad after all. No kidding!  You mean he wasn't a complete failure and extremist as we have all been ordered to believe?

I suppose that President Bush's biggest failure is that this decent and cooperative president didn't do enough to counter the Democratic campaign to make him into a crazed warmongering extremist.

Because the fact is that the overwhelming majority of his policies were mainstream and bipartisan.  He pushed No Child Left Behind, a centralization and federalization of education that Democrats had to love.  He passed the Medicare Part D drug bill, that had been a Democratic issue for years.

He pushed back on 9/11 to spank the mullahs in Afghanistan, and did regime change in Iraq, which you may recall was Clinton administration policy.  What he did not do was cut and run in 2006 when his Iraq policy was in ruins.

If we turn to the financial crisis, that wasn't about "fighting two wars on a credit card. "

Earth to Democrats: all wars are fought on a credit card.  Ever heard of the National Debt?  What is really bad is running the whole welfare state on a credit card.  As in trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.

No, the big problem was the easy credit policy that had obtained ever since the Plaza Accord of 1985 ended the hard money policy of the Paul Volker Fed and ended in the Fannie Freddie sub-prime mortgage orgy of the mid 2000s.  What should Bush have done about that?  Hard to say, because the rest of the political establishment was pushing cheap credit right up to the last minute, from Nancy Pelosi complaining about a "jobless recovery" in 2002 to Barney Frank calling for another roll of the Fannie dice in 2004 as the Bushies pushed for reform.

Many conservatives fault Bush for not being conservative enough.  They forget that the country wasn't in a mood for conservatism when Bush ran.  That's why he called himself a "compassionate conservative."  People were all jazzed about the federal budget surplus in 1998 and were ready to loosen the budget strings a little.  So Bush went with the consensus.  After 9/11 Bush felt that he should work on unifying the country for a long twilight war against Islamic extremism, and didn't want to create division.  That's what he meant with his line that he was a uniter not a divider.  Pity that Democrats had other ideas.

The fact is that Bush was a mainstream president, pushing a little to the right, and that is what the nation wanted at the time.  What it needed is something else.

What the nation needs is to get off the death-ride of the administrative welfare state.  What conservatives need to do is persuade the American people that the conservative prescription of limited government and unlimited civil society is a good thing that will both be good for them as individuals and families and good for the nation as a whole.

The problem is liberals.  They own the culture, and they will demonize anything that conservatives propose to "do something" about the mess we are in.  They are the ruling class and that's what ruling classes do.

When we talk about a "pre-revolutionary" situation we mean a situation in which the authority of the ruling class is coming into question.  It means that ordinary people are beginning to question whether the ruling class knows what it is doing.

Think France in the decades coming up to 1789.  The old ruling class of the monarchy and the Church and the nobility went from disaster to disaster and people started to coalesce under the leadership of a new class of thinkers and publicists.  It was the "new class" that is still today the ruling class in the West.

Nothing can change until the present ruling class has staggered from disaster to disaster for a decade or so and had lost its "mandate of heaven."  Then we shall see.

By then, of course, President George W. Bush will be remembered practically as a saint.

Watching Obama Fail

It's been a grueling 10 years, since the Dems went on the Bush offensive.  It has seemed as though nothing conservatives could do would stop the onslaught.

And the worst of it is that Democratic failures are all put on President Bush.  You can blame Bush all you want for Iraq, but everything else is bad Democratic ideas, from No Child Left Behind to cheap mortgages to stupid stimulus to cheap money and gargantuan deficits.

So conservatives can view the end of the Big Push with relief.  Now, maybe, as the Obamis fumble and bumble, the American people will be willing to listen to a conservative message.

The trouble is that it's not enough.  It is not enough for the American people to give up on liberals about once a generation and vote, sadder and wiser, for a Reagan or the Great White Hope of 2016.  We have seen what ended up after the rebirth of the Reagan Revolution.  It ended up with the locust years of Obama.  The American people voted twice for the most left-wing president since Roosevelt, twice.  And they are getting the same economy as the Roosevelt economy.  Twice.

We know what the problem is.  It's the culture.  No matter what conservatives put forward, it gets buried by the cultural hegemony of the ruling class, the educated class.

It's said that if you have to explain your position you have already lost.  Yes.  No doubt.  But it's important to realize that the Democrats have the media and the schools and Hollywood to do their explaining for them.  The only thing they need to add are the talking points.

Can conservatives ever hope even to an equality in the culture wars?  Probably not.  That is why people like me are reduced to predicting a moral revolution.  It is our only hope.

A moral revolution means that a critical mass of people in America make a moral turn in their lives and coalesce in a religious movement that starts to carry the rest of America with them.  It would not necessarily be a church-based movement, but something more like the civil-rights movement or the pro-life movement.

You can see right away the problem such a movement would have.  It would have to bulldoze through all the attacks from the liberal ruling class.  It would have to be Churchillian, and never, never, never, never give up.  In my view it would have to be a movement of young-to-middle-aged women.  They would have to be insisting on a woman's right to live a woman's life: a life based on love, devotion, chastity, and family.  Why?  Because anything else ends up brutalizing and objectifying and marginalizing women.  Or emptying woman's life of meaning.  I mean life as a career, sex as recreation, life without children.

As we see Obama fail, as he must, because of the poverty of his ideas and the emptiness of the liberal ruling class, we hope for better days.  But until women -- who usually do what they are told until it is too late -- rise up and demand a modern world that respects the life of women and things that have meaning for women, the years after Obama will only be a respite from the reduction of social life to an administrative life, and from association to domination, from society to state.

Until the revolution, then.

Just Say the Word

Foreign policy analyst Michael Ledeen has a good piece on our ruling class and its inability to face the fact of Islamic terrorism.  It just can't say that Islamic terror is a problem.  Take Iran, he writes.  We don't really need to deal with Iran militarily.  We just need to say the right words.

We can do a lot just by pronouncing the right words, like “we want a free Iran,” and “we support the Iranian people,” or “the Iranian regime is our enemy.” Those words would give hope to the regime’s opponents, and it would–as it would have in Boston–improve the quality of our own government’s investigators, analysts, and strategists.

The right words are important not just because truth-telling is important, but because it sends the right message to the bureaucratic functionaries.   Why?  Well look what happens when you discourage thinking about the "I" word.

The people who do counterterrorism shy away from seeing such terrorists, or potential terrorists, because if they point to such people, several bad things (from the investigators' and analysts' standpoint) happen.  First, the policy makers aren't going to do anything; second, the investigators and analysts aren't going to get promoted, or rewarded with bonuses; third, they may get sued or sent to the bureaucratic equivalent of Siberia.

 Yeah.  Why stop there?  The problem is that the whole nation is being strangled by a kind of liberal cultural totalitarianism.

Young Suzy Lee Weiss writes a funny article in The Wall Street Journal about the hypocrisy of the college application process, and the Today Show has her on to sneer at her and marshal experts to say that she's spoilt. (And read the comments: most of them have drunk the liberal KoolAid.)

Instawife Dr. Helen Smith writes about the war on men at the university.  She points out that men have only themselves to blame:

The discrimination will continue because there is no push back. If 5-10 percent of men fought back, stood up and started realizing that men’s rights are human rights and that they are not victims for daring to believe that their voices in gender and reproductive equality are just as important as a woman’s is, then maybe things will start to change. Until then, the kangaroo courts and angry feminists will have their day.

Yeah.  Aren't men supposed to have the courage to face up to the bullies and tell truth to power?

As I write in my American Thinker piece this week, we are coming to the end of the current liberal Big Push.  Liberals are intellectually exhausted after the big offensive that got President Obama elected, Obamacare passed, and the president reelected.  And all the pretty stories that they wrote are starting to fray at the edges: Osama dead, guns bad, immigration vital, health care just a matter of the right system.

Not to mention the bigger stories: getting a look at the seedy side of abortion in the Gosnell case, what you might call the Age of the Liberal Coathanger.  Who knew?

There are lots of other liberal narratives that are coming apart at the seams.  Only the truth struggles to get out, because liberals don't want to talk about it.

Someone has written that the Marxists tell the best stories.  Well, maybe.  I've just been reading a book on Marxism, leavened by a look at sociologists Emile Durkheim and Max Weber.

And what is coming through to me is the Marxist insistence on turning everything into a mud-hole.  The division of labor is held out to be a monstrous culture of alienation, the separation of mankind from its true nature.  But Durkheim points out that a division of labor is the most natural thing in the world, for it issues from natural human sociability.  If humans are gathered together, it is natural that Bill will go off into one corner and concentrate on one part of the problem, while Suzy will work on another problem.  At the end of the day, people will gather together and discuss what has been accomplished.  That is supposed to be alienation?

The end of the recent liberal Big Push will provide conservatives with a new chance to bring the tawdry liberal lies into disrepute and, more important get our own glorious story out there in the public square.

Of course that is what I do every hour of every day.

The Injustice of the Administrative State

So sad.  The administrative barbed wire entanglement of the Senate's gun control bill, offered by Senators Manchin (D-WV) and Toomey R-PA), has gone down in flames.  It was a bill made up in administrative secret and bounced on the Senate in all its 800 page glory.  Next up is Sen. Schumer's Gang of Eight immigration bill, another administrative monster full of plans and guidelines and timetables.  How many pages does it have?

But don't forget the granddaddy of them all, the Affordable Care Act, with its veritable northern forest of administrative provisions stretching to the far horizon.  The 2800 page Act itself is merely a demonstration forest compared to the vast bureaucratic continent that will be planted to implement it.

Some of the wisest minds have recognized that the legalistic politics that we now practice is problematic.  It's wonderful to use science in our political deliberations, but what about the human factor?  Here we have our ruling class setting out rigid rules to solve all kinds of problems, from gun violence to immigration to health care.  But has anyone seriously thought about whether an administrative system is a suitable approach to these issues?

Karl Marx worried that the naked exploitation of the capitalist economy inevitably alienated mankind from its natural culture.  Max Weber saw the modern age as an age of rationalization, in capitalism and in government.  But haven't we created an "iron cage" with this rationalization?  The Frankfurt School chappies noted that man uses reason to dominate, both nature and other men.

And so we come to my mantra: government is force; politics is division; administration is domination.

You can see this in the way that our liberal friends exempt themselves from administrative oversight.  Michelle Malkin has a piece on how this works in the abortion industry.

The Pennsylvania Department of State was “repeatedly confronted with evidence about Gosnell” — including the clinic’s unclean, unsterile conditions, unlicensed workers, unsupervised sedation, underage abortion patients and over-prescribing of pain pills with high resale value on the street — “and repeatedly chose to do nothing.”

Or this:

And an inspector for the National Abortion Federation, the leading association of abortion providers that is supposed to uphold strict health and legal standards, determined that Gosnell’s chamber of horrors was “the worst abortion clinic she had ever inspected” — but did nothing. 

It's the same as regulation of the finance industry.  How could we get a financial crash like 2008 with all those regulatory agencies?

Or immigration.  How come that liberal cities are allowed to declare themselves "sanctuary cities?"  How come I can't declare myself a "tax sanctuary" and refuse to abide by the tax laws?

The answer is pretty simple.  Everyone is equal, but some people are more equal that others.  Some people are the favorites of the ruling class and they get a pass from the regulatory enforcers.  In the case of abortion providers, they get cover from the pro-choice activist community.  In the case of the finance industry, its distortions and vulnerabilities are baked right in by the government, which likes a loosey-goosie credit system for its own convenience.  In the case of illegal immigration, Democrats are the national political home of recent immigrants, legal or illegal.

The problem is that the administrative state always has and always will play favorites.  As soon as you have administrative boards and committees and a collapse of the market into bureaucratic ukase then you are going to get arbitrary decisions based upon political power.

That's not a bug, it's a feature.

The magic of capitalism is that it dissolves this injustice; it combines reason with sentiment.  It forces its practitioners to think about the other guy, about how its customers might be inconvenienced by its arbitrary decisions, and how it might pay in losses for a foolish decision.

That doesn't apply to bureaucratic administrators.  They only have to think of what might prevent them from collecting their pensions.

The good thing is that the administrative state is grinding to a halt.  It just can't adjudicate the complexities of the modern world.  That is why its bills must be drafted in secret and then sprung upon the legislature with a full court press of lobbying and bullying.

But we believe in a better America.  An America that has climbed past the administrative state to the sunny green uplands of freedom and responsibility.

After Boston: Taxonomy of Political Conflict

When a nation state has a problem with another state, a problem that can't be resolved by diplomacy, it cranks up the printing press and goes to war.  That we understand.  But what about lower-level disagreements?

For instance, what about guerrilla movements?  Here you have an armed group dedicated to the overthrow of an existing government.  But a non-state actor like a guerrilla group cannot go head to head against a government in a full-scale war, so it must fight an "asymmetric" war, making life difficult for the government with raids on government facilities and enticing the people to withdraw support from a government that can't keep the peace.  Of course, very often a guerrilla group is financed by a state.  In fact, it is likely that very few guerrilla groups can survive without some sort of support from a state that wants to stir up trouble.

Then there are simple terror groups, that don't have the finance or the popular support to hide out in the country and maintain a permanent force under arms.  These groups are still groups with political agendas, but without the means or the ambition to conduct a full-scale guerrilla campaign. They really got going in that late 19th century when the combination of explosives and modern publicity made it possible to kill one person and frighten a million.  But you gotta give them credit.  You can really lower the prestige of a government with some well-placed bombs.  Maybe you can get the government to spend trillions of money for little return, like the US in the years after 9-11.

Then there's the lone wolf copycatting the terror conspiracies.  Perhaps Major Nidal Malik Hassan, the Fort Hood bomber, comes into that category.  A man is inspired to imitate others, and does so.

But let's not forget the left-wing activist group.  It is the cadre group representing itself as a spontaneous uprising of the people.  It is a political tradition of "peaceful protest" designed to project the impression in the media that injustice is abroad in the land and that helpless victims need relief.  The left-wing activist group is seldom popular, but achieves notoriety and momentum for its agenda through media facilitation.

Then we have the popular movement like the Tea Party that represents a genuine stirring in the people, and that moves fairly quickly to influence electoral politics.

Lastly we have the "mentally ill" single shooter, who doesn't have a political strategy, but just wants the notoriety of a bloody deed.

Everyone from the president on down is stigmatizing the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing as cowardly and cynical.  No doubt they are right.

But all opponents of a political regime face the same problem.  They want to replace the government.  Government, let us not forget, is force, and politics is division.  So any political actor that wants to replace the current regime of force must follow a strategy of division that ends up with his group taking over the levers of force and coercion.  Until the day of the final victory, he must divide the people from the government.

Clearly, this strategy of division must usually include creating the notion that the government has lost control and cannot keep the peace.  At the state level, this allows the opponents of the regime to rail about the waste of war.  At the guerrilla level they rail about the inability of the government to control its own territory.  At the terror bomb level, they demonstrate the inability of the government to protect people on the street from cowardly murderers.  At the left-wing protest level, people rail about the continuing stain of injustice.

At each level of insurrection, the actors are using the weapons that they believe are most effective for them, given the political and financial assets at hand, to make their point and delegitimize the government.

Force is force, and division is division.  Sometimes bloody deeds succeed; sometimes they don't.

But if you ask me, I'd say that far too many people think that they can improve life for themselves and the world through politics.   For the vast majority of people, the best way to improve life for themselves is to follow the advice of Rupert Murdoch and "produce something that other people are willing to pay for."

Maybe, if you do that, you can be a part of the movement that has got people in the United States from $3 per day in 1800 to a life of $120 per day right now.

That would be making a difference.